


right where you left me

by closingdoors



Series: Pepperony Week 2018 [5]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, Female Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Pepperony Week, Pepperony week 2018, Peter Pan References, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 15:03:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15633108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/closingdoors/pseuds/closingdoors
Summary: "Second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning."or, prompt five: post-infinity war





	right where you left me

**Author's Note:**

> A heads up: tomorrow's prompt most likely won't be uploaded until Saturday due to my work/social life interrupting my writing. Annoying, I know. Title taken from the song by Perlo.

**“You know that place between sleep and awake, that place where you still remember dreaming? That’s where I’ll always love you. That’s where I’ll be waiting.”**

**\- Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie**

 

* * *

 

 ****Happy turns to dust while he’s driving her back to the penthouse.

The car veers before she can react. It smashes through the glass front of a cafe and misses the occupants only because they turn to dust before her eyes. Then there’s darkness.

She wakes, uncertain of how much time has passed, blood dripping down her temple, and her left arm sticking out at a bad angle. Pain streaks through her when she shifts and she sets her jaw and hisses against it. Pepper cradles the arm against her chest and tries to untangle herself from her seat belt. Her chest feels tight, she knows there’ll be bruising, and it takes her far too long to release the latch. Once she does, she throws the car door open instantly.

Inside the cafe there is nothing but half-finished coffees, dust, and debris. She navigates her way around the glass shattered on the floor to reach the driver’s door. She pulls it open, hoping like hell that Happy will reappear, that what she just witnessed wasn’t real. But there’s nothing. She’s not sure what dust is from the crash and what is him. Nausea overwhelms her at the thought and she slams the driver’s door closed.

Pepper opens the trunk, leaning heavily against the car. Her breathing feels restricted now. But she continues anyway, forcing the pain to the back of her mind, opening the briefcase just like the one Tony had owned so many years ago. This time, it opens at the touch of her fingertips. And it spans outwards, the suit climbing up her arm, the nanites linking and weaving until it encompasses her completely, babying her broken arm.

“Miss Potts,” FRIDAY greets her as the interface lights up, “I’m scanning your injuries now.”

“I feel…” She pauses. Her heartbeat is loud in her ears. _Woosh, woosh._ “What happened? Where’s Happy?”

“You’ve suffered a severe concussion, miss, and I am detecting signs of internal bleeding in your abdomen.”

Pepper’s legs try to give out, but the suit holds her up.

“Miss Potts, I’m going to take you somewhere safe.”

 _Woosh, woosh._ “Okay.”

“Miss? Try to stay awake.”

The suit lifts, she feels her body go with it, but her ears are heavy with her heart and the blood drying on her skin is distracting.

“Yeah,” she murmurs, and passes out again.  


 

*

 

 

Pepper wakes to find her body free of RESCUE. The bed she’s in doesn’t _feel_ like a hospital bed and - actually, the room around her doesn’t look anything like a hospital either. She tries to sit and succeeds. Her arm doesn’t even ache anymore. She peeks under her clothes - the same damn jogging gear she’d been wearing when Tony’d left - and there’s no bruising across her chest.

“What the hell?” She murmurs.

There’s movement in the corner of her eye. Bruce is sat beside her, a little solemn, but smiling.

“You’re awake.”

“Where am I?”

Bruce’s eyebrows raise. “You don’t know? You’re in Wakanda.”

Pepper licks her lips. Her mouth is dry and full of the metallic taste of blood.

“Didn’t you fly here on purpose?”

“No,” she says, reaching for the water sitting at her bedside. “The suit brought me here. I don’t remember… Bruce, what happened? Where’s Tony?”

Bruce places his face in his hands. Pepper begins to grieve.

  


*

  


On her fifth night in Wakanda, Pepper takes herself for a long walk.

She has the nanotech wrapped around her wrist like a bracelet, should she need it. There’s no way she will. They’ve already lost a war only Tony had known they were fighting. But it’s the only way Bruce and Rhodey will let her out of their sight - like they owe it to Tony to keep her safe - so she takes the suit with her.

The night air is cooling. There’s a light breeze that makes the ends of her hair sway, tickle against the skin of her elbows. Pepper sits atop a hill, on the edge of Wakanda, where the view is swapped from advanced structures to farmers’ fields. It’s beautiful. There’s no light pollution, so the sky swathes as far as she can see, the stars bright and unashamed.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Pepper glances over her shoulder. The young girl who’d, according to Bruce, saved her life, is approaching her. Shuri gives her a small smile before she plops herself down beside Pepper.

“It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to.”

“And you’ve been to many.”

Pepper arches an eyebrow.

Shuri grins. “Stark’s technology is advanced despite his lack of vibranium. I keep tabs. Of course, I read up on you too.”

“Nothing much to read. I do all the boring paperwork,” she comments dryly.

“No. I think any woman in power is fascinating,” Shuri replies, and Pepper refrains from asking her how it feels to be the Queen of Wakanda.

Pepper turns her gaze back to the stars. A little naively, she’s been fooling herself into hoping one of them is Tony. At least then she would have a little piece of him. She could turn him into a fairy tale, the kind he'd like. Like Peter Pan - _second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning._

“You know,” Shuri says, “now that my brother is dead, that leaves his suit to me.”

Pepper glances at her out of the corner of her eye. There’s a moment where the image Shuri has set up for herself breaks. The smiling, grin-and-bear-it young woman is gone, replaced with a tired, grieving sister.

Pepper touches the nanotech on her wrist.

“Will you use it?” Pepper asks, her gaze returning to the stars.

“I think so. I have always preferred the working in the lab, but I will fight for my brother until he’s back,” Shuri says, so confidently Pepper almost believes that they have a chance to reverse what Thanos did. “Will you?”

Pepper sighs. “I don’t want to.”

“But you will.”

“Yes.”

“I thought so.”

There’s a softness around her shoulders then. Pepper shifts and finds Shuri is draping a blanket over her, shielding her from the night breeze. The young woman gives her a shy, humble shrug, and Pepper catches her hand.

“Thank you for saving my life.”

Shuri grins. “You’re not the first.”

“I know. But thank you anyway,” Pepper insists. “And… I didn’t know him, but I imagine your brother would be very proud of you.”

Shuri’s grin drops. She blinks, a thin sheen of tears appearing in her eyes for a millisecond, and then the grin reappears.

“I think he is, too.”

Pepper watches the girl go until she’s a speck in the distance. Instead of looking to the stars this time she looks down at the bracelet. The nanites are cold against her skin. She wonders, briefly, is that’s how it felt for Tony, wherever he had been when it happened. If the suit around him had been cold, death even colder. How it had happened, and where. If he had thought of her in his final moments.

Pepper takes a deep breath and holds it. She only releases after she lets herself stop thinking about it. Bruce and Rhodey insist there’s a chance that Tony could still be alive. Even if he is, she doesn’t know how he’d get home.

Pepper slips her shoes off and digs her toes in the soft earth. The grass tickles between her toes. She tugs the blanket a little tighter around her shoulders. FRIDAY had told her the last recorded movements from Tony had involved kidney rupture and internal bleeding, and then connection had been severed. Of course, Pepper hasn’t told Bruce or Rhodey this. She lets them hope. If it helps them, she’ll allow it.

She grieves silently, his ring on her finger, his suit on her wrist.

 

 

*

 

 

Ten days after she arrives in Wakanda, there’s a shooting star.

She wonders, briefly, if that’s his suit out there, burning up and making one last beautiful display.

 

 

*

 

 

The service they have for Happy is brief. She finds that she doesn’t know as much about his personal life as she’d thought, despite how long he’d been working for Tony. She doesn’t even know the names of his parents. It hadn’t even occurred to her to contact them before. There’s guilt, worsened when FRIDAY provides her with Happy’s next of kin contacts, and finds both of his parents had passed decades ago.

 

 

*

  


Steve finds her fifteen days into her stay.

“I’m sorry,” he says hoarsely, and she tries to be angry on Tony’s behalf, but the truth is that Tony hadn’t been angry anymore.

Pepper nods to the seat beside her. Steve takes it. He glances at the book in her hands, _Peter Pan,_ and smiles.

“A fan of fairytales?”

Pepper closes the book. It’s a new edition, it doesn’t have the same feel as Tony’s copy at home. She places it on the desk.

“It was Tony’s favourite as a child. I always preferred Mulan. The original version, not the fairytale.”

Steve takes the book in his hands. It looks small in comparison. She aches to hold it against her chest, protect it, but she lets him have it.

“My mom always read me The Ugly Duckling when I was a kid,” Steve tells her. He skims through the pages. “Figures.”

“Yes,” she agrees.

Steve holds the book up. “You mind if I take this?”

“Be my guest.”

Steve pushes his chair back and stands. Though she’s only ever known him as the tall, muscular Captain, she can’t help but view him as the young, skinny boy from the old photos she’s seen. It’s the same with Tony sometimes.

“We’re gonna get him back,” Steve tells her, gripping the book.

She lets him have hope. “Yes. You will.”

  


*

 

 

Pepper leaves Wakanda after twenty-three days. She doesn’t go to New York because she knows nothing will be there. Instead she returns to her hometown and reunites with her mom and her sister, grateful that, if she can’t have Tony, at least she has them.

Her sister, tall and lithe, leans against the beams of her mom’s porch one evening. She pulls a cigarette out, glancing back to make sure their mom isn’t lurking around, and offers another to Pepper. Pepper declines it in a wistful sort of way, thinking of the quiet ways she used to rebel as a teenager, just like this.

“You know,” her sister says, holding the cigarette between her lips and cupping her hands around the lighter, “I really was starting to like him.”

Pepper rests her chin in her left palm. Her ring is cool against her cheek.

“Me too,” Pepper remarks dryly.

Her sister sits on the porch steps beside her. Nothing in this small town has changed, despite everything that’s happened, and she almost wishes for a moment that she and Tony had been like that. Stuck in stasis.

“You know what I mean.”

In spite of her best interests, Pepper reaches over and snags a drag of the cigarette. It burns down her throat. The warmth in her chest doesn’t linger. It’s gone as soon as she breathes out again.

 

 

*

 

 

The board wants her to confirm Tony’s death. It’s been thirty-three days. The world is beginning to move again, and though she’d loved Tony, she’s the CEO of his company, and the two are colliding. She puts it off for four days. Always making an excuse of a meeting, or citing legal reasons, or outright ignoring the calls. Her assistant hadn’t made it, so she’s left screening every e-mail and phone call herself.

Thirty-seven days after half of the world turns into dust, she confirms that half of her had died too.

 

 

*

 

 

Shuri had fixed her, but sometimes Pepper can still feel it. The blood dripping down. She pictures it in her sleep one night, dripping slowly and surely, like chinese water torture. When she wakes, it’s with a start, the sweat making the sheets cling to her frame. She walks over to the glass doors leading to the balcony and throws them open, even though the rain is falling outside.

She’s been staying in New York to oversee the rebuild of the city. There’d been many accidents, like her car crash, following what people are now calling The Culling. There’re store fronts to be fixed, skyscrapers to be reinforced, apartments to be torn down and built again. Stark Industries has drawn up so many contracts to help she’s lost count. It's all she can think to do. Keeping busy, being productive,  _helping_ people is the sort of thing that he'd do, and it's the only constructive way she knows how to deal with her grief. She doesn't know what that says about her.

Tonight, she can smell the rain in the air. She stands on the balcony, letting it wet her skin, make her pyjamas hug her frame a little tighter. She shivers.

Pepper rests her elbows on the balcony and closes her eyes just as she hears the familiar sounds of the suit’s thrusters. She hears them shut off, and Tony’s arms are around her instantly. 

 


End file.
